Sunday, 14 June 2015

System upgrade 1.1.6.27 Aaslakkajärvi available for all

Update your Jolla with"Lake of the playing Gods"
Sailfish OS 1.1.6.27 Aaslakkajärvi was published on June 15th, 2015. The English name above is translated using some etymology, see the end of post for more on that. Jolla didn't make changes to the version shared to Early Access users a week ago.

Update: Video added

Sailfish OS 1.1.6.27 Aaslakkajärvi, or "Lake of the playing Gods"

Share and Shout! Your friends might read it.

Email search, Private browser tabs, and Facebook is back withpartial official support, full unofficial support

System tool: Quick launch of CSD tool from Settings > System > About Product > gesture:5 taps on the OS version number. Note: the tool has been translated to English and Chinese only

System update: Better OS upgrade handling, OS upgrade notifications update automatically in case there is a newer OS version available, Filesystem optimizations prior to installing OS upgrades. This will be effective from the next upgrade onwards.

Facebook functionality*: Jolla recently received approval from Facebook on their new implementation. The account should now work after a re-login.

*Officially, Facebook implementation has currently the following features working:

calendar sync

feeds and notifications

Facebook photo album sync to gallery

Sharing image from gallery app to Facebook

*Unofficially, Facebook contacts and IM (chat) are both tested to work using this workaround, including sound notification on incoming messages and status of your online friends in the people app as a green line. The workaround enables Facebook instant messaging using Messages app, or via People app on Jolla.

New features on video

Jolla fan Fendi Tsim made this informative video, showing us in few minutes some of the changes made after the earlier version of Sailfish OS, adding a nice review of app Photo Funia to the end:

Before installing

NEW: Recommended max used storage is 10 GB of the available 13.7 GB according to Jolla Zendesk. You can check your storage in Settings > System > About product.Note: There's still older information on TJC about having ~1.5 GB of free space to be enough. Jolla has not mentioned about this change, but to play it safe, it's probably the best to follow the latest available information and arrange 3.7 GB of free space. You can also wait for updates on TJC (link) if you have less free space.

If you use phonehook from OpenRepos, uninstall it before upgrading

If you use patchmanager, revert all applied patches before upgrading

If your device is running software version lower than 1.0.4.20 and have WareHouse app installed (i.e you are using OpenRepos), disable all openrepo repositories before attempting to upgrade your device

Take a backup of your data before attempting to upgrade your device. A successful backup operation is indicated by a green dot in the UI

While installing

NEW: Keep your Jolla connected to charger

Do not reboot the device while the update is in progress.

The device screen may blank out during the update process, you may waken the display by a short press on the power key to monitor the progress.

Note: From version 1.1.6 onward (first time during the next update after 1.1.6), your phone will run certain preparation processes before the install procedure begins. These includes checking and optimizing the file system.

Security fixes

Upgrade version history

1.1.6.27 (2015-06-08): Initial early access release

1.1.6.27 (2015-06-15): public release

Known issues on the update process

Currently, checks on available disk space happens very late during the OS upgrade process and will fail in the installation phase if the disk space is low. Normally there should be an error note asking you to free some disk space and try again, but in some marginal cases it might not be shown. Should this happen, free some disk space and try to install the OS update again.

OS update may fail due to some other reasons too, for example it may have installed some packages from the new release and still have something left from the old. If the device can boot up, you can try to recover by doing the following. If not, you can attempt to recover the device using the recovery mode:

Delete the file /home/nemo/.cache/store-client/os-info

Stop the store-client process (for e.g. pkill store-client)

Reopen Settings app, check for updates again and attempt to install the OS update again

We have also noted that if the OS update is attempted while there is long queue of installation of apps from the Store, the system may end up in mixed state (for e.g. select all the apps from startup wizard, and start the system update already while the apps are being installed). In such cases, the OS update appears to be stalled, however it is just waiting for the installations to complete before attempting to upgrade the OS. Just wait patiently, the worst thing to do here is to reboot the device!

Not fixed yet

IPv6 connectivity is not fully supported. Users reported running into battery life issues on Sailfish OS 1.1.4.29, and Jolla found out it's because of IPv6 traffic. To avoid increased power consumption, Jolla has again enabled multicast filtering on Sailfish OS 1.1.6.27. Later Jolla is planning to add a new option to manually enable IPv6. (Hopefully this shall only be temporary until the full support is reached.)

Browser: After zooming, some pages might dislocate links or buttons. Affecting on some web sites only. Recommended to use other browsers (webcat, Android browsers) on these sites until this is fixed.

Turn by turn voice navigation: This feature is not coming up according to Jolla's answer at TJC. However, several Android navigation apps are reported to work just fine. I'm recommending NavFree or HERE Drive, both available for example on Aptoide Store

Video recording: Audio quality is reduced after few seconds of recording

Video codec issue: Videos recorded with Jolla camera requires converting from H.263 format to any HTML5 supported format for playback in browsers (including Jolla's default browser). Converting is done automatically by several video upload sites, and there are also free programs to convert videos yourself. I recommend converting from MP4(.h263) to MP4(.h264) for easy playback.

Aaslakkajärvi is already tested by Early Adopters

Jolla announced Early Adopter Program on January 2015, enabling delivering the release candidates to volunteers among the customers earlier than the update is released for public. These Early Adopters received this update on June 8th. You can find more information at:

Sailfish OS Aaslakkajärvi - the name
We've kept you up to date with the Finnish lakes which Jolla is using in their release naming, and lately also in the translations. This time we took some etymology along, hope you like it as additional information.

Aaslakkajärvi is a 10 acres wide lake located in Lapland, Finland, close to Enontekiö. Translation and etymology:

"Aaslakka" relates to old Swedish / Danish / Finnish male first name "Aslak", written in Lapland as "Ásllat"

"As" is germanic name element sometimes interpreted as meaning the god "Þórr" in names. The origin could lie in Germanic *ans- = 'beam, post' (devotion to wooden gods) or Old Indian ásura-, ásu = 'vitality'

"Leikr" or "Leik" stands for play, game or fight

"järvi" is a lake

The whole name "Aaslakkajärvi" could that way be translated for example as "Lake of the playing gods", but in this translation we would go back in history so much that it can't be taken as the exact correct translation. In more modern language, maybe "Lake of Aslak" would work as correct.

This release is also called upgrade 15, or shortly, u15 mostly in internal use. Upgrade 14 (1.1.5) was never released to public. The first letter for naming the 1.1.5 would probably have been "Ö", the last letter in Scandinavian alphabet.

There are 187 888 lakes in Finland, including the small ones, so we might have more than a few updates coming up.